There has never been a more pertinent time to discuss the accountability and the legal responsibility of Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, for fundamental rights violations. In a... Show moreThere has never been a more pertinent time to discuss the accountability and the legal responsibility of Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, for fundamental rights violations. In a period that hosts the first legal actions vis-à-vis the agency and a series of relevant non-judicial investigations, including by the European Parliament, this dissertation aims to address the main problem underlying these accountability efforts, namely the ‘problem of many hands’. As conceptualised by Dennis Thompson, this problem is where the multiplicity of the actors involved obscures the various responsibilities and creates gaps in accountability.To address it, this work contests the dominant ways of looking at the concepts of responsibility and accountability, and reimagines them for their optimal function.It adopts a holistic approach, taking into account not only judicial, but also other forms of accountability, studying not only EU liability law, but also other legal remedies before the CJEU, the ECtHR, and domestic courts, building bridges between international and EU law, and traveling from the empirical to the conceptual, to the normative, and from there to the applied.It creates the foundations for the accountability of the agency inside and outside courts, within the EU borders and beyond. Show less
The interaction of multiple actors if European Border and Coast Guard Operations leads to a nexus of responsibilities, both individual and collective, positive and negative, direct or indirect,... Show moreThe interaction of multiple actors if European Border and Coast Guard Operations leads to a nexus of responsibilities, both individual and collective, positive and negative, direct or indirect, that is hard to disentangle. The connections between the responsibility of member states and that of the agency often lead to a non-singular answer to the question of the one responsible, which is not accommodated by the existing paradigm of legal accountability. Thus, this paper suggests a different approach to accountability, named ‘systemic accountability’, arguing from the perspective of justice, the rule of law, and strategic litigation. Show less
